Cassandra walks the barricades of morning,

ash in her hair, placards under her arm,

a ledger of names kept like a psalm,

and she is tired of truth being treated as false alarm.

When she opens her mouth the city looks away,

yet the footpath hums; the day is tuning itself.
She learned prophecy on the newsroom floor:

how hours are shaved from lives like filings,

how words are the cheapest tool in politics,

how a genocide becomes collateral damage by noon.

She sang to the cameras that never quite arrived.

The editor turned the radio up.
A chorus gathers: in town halls, at kitchen tables,

the slow courage of signatures gathered one by one.

We inherit the stubborn work of the living,

the long strike against forgetting.

No final victory, only the daily struggle

of ever-mending what the powerful tear.
She calls from ruined gates we keep rebuilding,

from a Troy that is always falling, somewhere,

from classrooms where truth splits at the seam,

from hospitals where the siege is merciless.

The wind carries her warning through borders’ barbed wire;

we measure its force by how quickly it’s dismissed.
Names become torches: not idols, but beacons.

Cassandra cried power and we answer with labour,

with mothers who queue for crumbs and justice

for their orphans, whose children they’ll never meet,

with fathers who rinse the dust from their lungs

and vote between shifts with blood on their sleeves.
She paces the beach, eyes on the horizon,

a warning always on her lips. Mute with the retelling,

deaf to her warnings, they gather and watch

(preferring comfort over truth) denying it even

as the sea rises and the waves lick at their feet.

Through her fingers runs a handful of sand.
Listen: the politicians say patience; the lawyers say later;

the market says never; the crowd chants now.

Cassandra says the same as yesterday, and tomorrow:

that rights are verbs, not monuments.
She keeps singing into rooms that prefer echoes,

into chambers that prize decorum over change,

into news cycles that bite their own tails.

Her voice is the loom where futures are woven,

threaded through rust and acid rain,

refusing to be quiet enough to be safe.
And when the sirens finally do arrive,

they find us rehearsed, not resigned:

a thousand small solidarities, a standing shieldwall,

wet with weather, hoarse with purpose,

ready to lift the next demand from the ground

and carry it as far as we can.
Remember this, she sings, the bright of her breath keeping time:

there is no final victory, only faithful effort:

hands ink-stained, throat-sore, heartbeat steady,

and if you ask what keeps the future from collapsing,

it is the singing, not the song.